So you think
you want to
work at the
airport, eh?

Oh, the romance of working at the airport. Jets filled with jetsetters off to frolic at Club Med, Fatcat Execs riding first-cabin to close big deals, people in starched white uniforms checking the cavities of smelly bodies for exploding lip gloss.

Sure, we all know what it means to be an airline pilot. But how many times have we all wondered about those other people working at the airport…the ramp agents, the ticket agents, the luggage jockeys? Is it really so exciting to endure a constant barrage of irate travelers screaming obscenities at them about lost luggage, or trying to explain away yet another gate delay or overbooking by using the same tired excuses you used last hour.

The life of all those other people at the airport must be hell. So it makes perfect sense that in light of these horrible conditions, they MUST be raking in the dollars on pay day.

Oh, if that were only the case…

World of Flying has been scouring the national job listings, and the results might surprise you. (Note: some of these listings may be a few months old, so exact pay scales may have changed slightly):

The first smiling face you see at the curb might be an Airport Skycap who is earning $1,400 to $2,700 per month. They’re smiling because skycaps have the potential to receive sizable tips. At the counter, you’ll check in with a Gate Agent making a whopping average starting pay of $7.50 to $10 per hour. Before you ever get on the plane though, people in the airline’s corporate office will have performed such complex duties as this:

A Strategic Pricing and Forecast Yield Management Analyst is charged with managing revenue on the airline’s domestic and international flights. They develop and implement inter-departmental revenue-maximization strategies through rigorous quantitative analysis of historical passenger demand. They work on the front-lines of the competitive pricing battle waged daily between airlines, forecasting passenger demand by market segment, optimizing seat allocations across the flight network and developing overbooking strategies.

Wow. That’s sounds like you’d need an MBA to pull that job off, but with a starting salary of just $32,000 - $38,000, it’s no wonder those “overbooking strategies” are never well received.

Before ATC can launch a plane full of souls, those PAX must first get through security, where a Transportation Security Officer (Screener) is earning a range of $23,600 - $35,400. Also in line – maybe in wrinkled shorts and a t-shirt for cover – might be a Federal Air Marshal who is earning a beginning salary of $35,100 to $80,800. The low end of that one scares me a little.

As you strap yourself in, out the window is a stocky “Ramp Agent” punishing your Samsonite for up to $26.00 per hour. Next to him, the guy shoving boxes in the cargo hold is yearning for the day he can punish your luggage, ‘cause he’s only making up to $11 per hour.

When the crew up front firewalls the throttles, you launch into a system controlled by Air Traffic Control Specialists making a starting salary of $31,700 or about $15.24 an hour …not so much to push tin around the sky. And if you are flying one of the feeder airlines, the Flight Attendant is not getting rich at an advertised salary of $17.50 per flight hour. Per flight hour? So she makes, what, about twelve bucks for that 35-minute puddle jump from Eugene up to PDX? No wonder she is a touch cranky today.

There you have it, all the data I could cull out of the national job listings. Writing this has been a bit of an eye opener, and I think I will try really, really hard to be a bit more compassionate next time a Gate Agent is giving me that crappy canned excuse about a weather delay or mechanical problems with the plane. After all, he/she is really only earning a few dollars an hour more than the clown over at Wal•Mart.

Maybe if they paid these people a living wage, we’d get back to something that resembles customer service in the airline industry. Gee, now there’s an idea…